Paid sick leave will leave liberals on the mend

"Do you know why people don't like liberals?" asks fictional cable news anchor Will McAvoy in the first episode of HBO's "The Newsroom."

His answer, depending on your political persuasion, will either make you laugh or cringe: "'Cause they lose."

A proposal to mandate paid sick time in Orange County could go down as the latest defeat to back the loser liberal theory.

Citizens for a Greater Orange County, a self-described coalition of unions, public health groups, faith leaders, small-business owners and others, is about 6,000 signatures short of what it needs to get on the November ballot.

Today is the deadline that Mayor Teresa Jacobs set for the County Commission to approve the measure so the ballots can be printed in time for the election.

But the group behind the paid sick time campaign will ask the commission for more time to gather signatures.

How's that for stereotypical liberal whining? We're so close. We just need a little more time. My Volvo broke down on the way to the supervisor's office.

It's unlikely they'll find much sympathy from Jacobs and the mostly Republican commission.

And there's good reason for that.

This tenuous economy is no time to start issuing government mandates for how employees should be paid, and for what.

Providing sick time, especially for parents of young children who sometimes feel like they see the inside of a pediatrician's office more often than their own, is the right thing to do. And businesses that can afford it ought to do it.

But requiring businesses to pay employees for as many as seven sick days, or one hour for every 37 hours worked, will likely turn out to be an over-reach by the group behind the ballot push.

They got started late for an initiative of this size — not until June — but they likely could have made it on the ballot and had a chance of passing if they had limited their efforts to a smaller, but just as important question: whether business should be able to fire workers for missing a shift because they're sick.

The answer is no.

The people who get the worst deal are those on the lowest end of the income spectrum. The restaurant servers, cooks or souvenir sellers who work for minimum wage, or close to it.

Restaurants and retail stores are notorious for telling workers that if they can't make it in today, they might as well not bother coming back at all.

We're not talking about losing a day's pay here; we're talking about losing a job.

If a worker is paid $10 an hour and calls out sick five days in a year's time, that's a loss of $400. A lot of money, sure, but nowhere near the hardship of losing a job.